You don't want to be facing a situation like this!
It has been said that there is no thrill like having been shot at, and missed. I know that feeling, and more. January 19th, 2012 at 7:15pm was the date and time when my wife and I cheated death. We did this by having cultivated a habit over many years that finally saved the day for us.
As is my custom, when driving I tend to take notice of passages of roadways that seem to be innocent enough, but I see things that perhaps others don't, and I ask the question, "What if?" What if someone else did something they should not do, how can I best defend myself. This is the basics of defensive driving. For instance, if you crest a hill and over the other side there is an entrance to the main road, if a truck with a very long trailer is pulling across the road, he will take ten seconds to clear my lane. I need to be travelling slow enough to give him the time to do that. If I know the entrance road is there then I must assume that the truck will also be there. That is driving with anticipation.
In the incident I am referring to, I was passing through a passage of roadway that took us down into a deep valley, and at the bottom I cannot see whether there is any traffic coming towards me. The road is only a two-lane ribbon with two-way flow of traffic. As we rise up the other side we only see traffic coming towards us at the last minute.
My question was what do I do if there is a car coming towards me on my side. For seven years I have been treating that piece of road by positioning my car to the extreme right, with my rightside wheels along the white line marker that signifies the exterior of the road. That is where we were at 7:15pm on January 19th, when I saw a car coming straight towards us headed for a full-on crash that would have killed us and the other driver. This man, and it was a man with excrement where his brains should be, because no woman would be so stupid, was overtaking another car, but that driver was evidently so horrified by what the man was doing that he moved as far to the right as he could, and between he and myself, we made a hole for the moron to squeeze through. He was so close that we felt his force field rock our car.
It's a strange feeling to have cheated death. At first I felt numb, not fully understanding the significance of the moment. The next day, when I awoke I just lay still and looked at the ceiling in amazement, because that was a day I was not supposed to see. My taste of Life is different somehow. My routines that had become jaded and blasé suddenly had colour.
Where I might have slept through things, I now have a new lease on life, but everyday I ask the same question: "Now What?"
There are a lot of really stupid people who should not be behind the wheel of a car. Eventually they end up killing themselves, but not without taking innocent people with them. It's a shame it has to be that way.
Copyright (c) 2012 Eugene Carmichael
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